Indonesia crash plane had cash for the poor

The first bodies of 54 people killed when a plane went down in eastern Indonesia were Wednesday carried from the remote crash site after bad weather hampered efforts to airlift them.

The four passengers recovered earlier have been identified as a teacher, a government official, a student and a postal worker who had been transporting around Rp 6.5 billion ($470,000) to be distributed to the poor in the region.

It took rescuers two days to reach the site, about 15 kilometres (nine miles) from Oksibil, after initial efforts were hindered by the rough terrain and bad weather.

The Trigana Air Service ATR 42-300 plane crashed on Sunday, the latest in a string of aviation disasters in the sprawling South-East Asian archipelago.

Local military commander Colonel Sugiono said the missing flight data recorder had now been found, Antara news agency reported.

A team of three investigators from France’s BEA agency, which probes air accidents, and four technical advisors from ATR, a European plane maker based in France, have arrived in the Indonesian capital Jakarta to help with the investigation.

It lost contact with air traffic control 10 minutes before landing as it tried to descend in thick clouds and rain.

Within a few hours, search teams had found the bodies of all 54 victims in the wreckage of the short-haul airliner, pieces of which were still smoldering, said Tatang Kurniadi, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Committee.

The airline’s crisis center official in Jayapura’s Sentani airport said all the passengers were Indonesians.

The Basarnas crew is also searching for the ATR-42 twin turboprop plane’s data recorders to determine why the plane crashed during a flight from Jayapura to Oksibil, the Pegunungan Bintang district seat.

Indonesia airways, no stranger to airline tragedies, has been prevented prior to now from flying in Europe due to its poor security requirements.